Leaders in Pakistan were thrown into crisis-management mode this week as tensions over border skirmishes with India spiked and observers worried aloud whether large protests in the capital were setting the stage for a soft coup ahead of elections. On Thursday, tens of thousands of protesters camped for the fourth day in front of Parliament in Islamabad, gathered under tarps and blankets in cold temperatures and heavy rain to listen to religious scholar Tahirul Qadri address the crowd. The Canadian-Pakistani antigraft crusader, who issued a fatwa against terrorism in 2010, led a march from Lahore to the capital earlier in the week. Calling the country’s leaders too corrupt to continue to rule, Qadri called for, among other things, the government to immediately dissolve its legislative bodies and set up a caretaker administration ahead of national polls scheduled for May. “This corrupt ruling mafia don’t want to listen to the poor people of Pakistan,” he tweeted out to some 22,000 followers on Thursday.

The sit-in, beset by increasingly unsanitary conditions and reports of illness, was expected to disband by Thursday night as a government delegation reportedly entered talks with Qadri by late afternoon. According to several journalists’ tweets, power went out during the talks in the metal container where Qadri has been based for the week. With or without electricity, what will come out of the conversation is unclear, as is what — or who — prompted Qadri to start this sudden people’s movement, given that the cleric lived in Canada for the past several years. The fact that he emerged in 1999 to publicly back the coup by former military chief Pervez Musharraf has some wondering whether he has shown up now with the military’s backing to help orchestrate a similar ouster.

Both Qadri and the military have denied such speculations, and some analysts say sudden talk of a so-called soft coup took shape a little too quickly. “The military is bogged down in counterterrorism,” says Hasan Askari Rizvi, a security expert based in Lahore. “If they do anything, they will do it from the sidelines.”

Still, he says protests have served the military’s interests by putting the government of President Asif Ali Zardari on the back foot. Rizvi says Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry also sensed an opportunity to strike, ordering the arrest of Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf and other officials earlier this week on charges of corruption. Ashraf has denied any wrongdoing, and on Thursday the head of the government’s anticorruption agency said it would not act now on the arrest, citing rushed paperwork.

It’s too soon to tell what will come out of the talks being held tonight in Islamabad. Rizvi says the results will likely be a “compromise,” designed in part to help Qadri save face after he didn’t get the political backing he may have expected from opposition parties. The government was due to set up a caretaker government ahead of elections anyway, as per Pakistani law, and the government may simply urge the cleric to accept that the process he was calling for will take place later.

Negotiating that deal is not the only crisis that Pakistan’s government has been fielding this week. The nation’s commitment to protecting religious and tribal minorities has been called into question in large protests in the southwestern city of Quetta and in the northwestern city of Peshawar, where demonstrators amassed after security forces allegedly killed 18 members of the Bara tribe.

Relations with India have been strained after a series of skirmishes at the Line of Control that separates Pakistan and India-controlled Kashmir sent both nations’ media into a frenzy and led leaders to exchange some chilly words. Though the 2003 cease-fire has been periodically violated in the past decade, the reported deaths of five soldiers this month threatened to unravel the fragile peace there. On Wednesday, military leaders met and agreed to exercise mutual restraint, and no firing was reported at the border on Wednesday night.

In New Delhi, Foreign Minister Salman Khurshid was reportedly considering bilateral talks after Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar proposed to meet. “Instead of issuing belligerent statements by the military and political leaders from across the border and ratcheting up tension, it is advisable for the two countries to discuss all concerns related to Line of Control (LOC) with a view to reinforcing respect for the cease-fire, may be at the level of the Foreign Ministers to sort out things,” she said in a statement on Wednesday. “Continued tension along the LOC is not in the interest of peace and stability in the region.”

@Ashish BhallaYou mean hunter land where predators roam free
in search of help less minors and woman; you possess whole lot of Hindu
Intellectualism, could be a great asset for a country, good at diversions and
disillusions please be careful in riding a Delhi bound bus with window curtains
rolled down.

This is nothing new. Pakistan lurches from crisis to crisis and the last week is another example. The reality is that an elected Government is desperately trying to establish credibility in the world when the Military is making it impossible. Internally, the Civillian Government is a joke and every move is undermined by the Military. After the Mumbai blasts, a bold statement by the Government suggested a visit to India by the iSI Chief, only to be retracted within 24 hours. The skirmishes on the border, the march by Qadri, the firing of Prime Ministers, corruption charges against Zardari etc are all orchestrated by the Military that is deeply worried about losing control after 65 years of power. A huge nATO presence in Afghanistan means that no coups are possible. Welcome to the 'theatre of the absurd1"